Saturday, August 06, 2016

Trump and the Demise of American Conservatism

American conservatism has been in a tailspin for...well...my lifetime, basically. It's not that it hasn't occasionally been tactically successful, as it was during the Reagan years. But intellectually and morally it's been a train wreck. Trump is just the final railroad spike in the coffin. Conservatives might object that he's not conservative...which is true. But conservatives have refused to reject him in any systematic way. Which means that they're willing to put a completely unqualified moron/ignoramus non-conservative with a shitty temperament in the White House--rather than lose to a perfectly ordinary, fairly centrist Democrat. And, unless conservatives are stupid enough to believe frothy GOP propaganda about HRC, they know damn good and well that she's just fine. She's an ordinary centrist Democrat.
One thing conservatives have gotten right in my lifetime is: character matters. Though they say this as a way of praising Reagan, Reagan's character was no great shakes, so far as I can tell. And, in fact, in my political lifetime, only Carter and Obama had characters to write home about. At any rate character does matter--a lot. And that's why any sensible person should be willing to pay a very high price in order to keep Trump away from the presidency. The fact that conservatives are, in general, still supporting him shows how corrupted and unhinged conservatism has become.